Day 9

We woke up early yet again to drive to Lake Tahoe, NV. The drive was boring but Lake Tahoe was stunning, and we picnicked on the rocks with Subway sandwiches that we'd been craving since Chicago. The view of the Lake was beautiful! Then we drove to Yosemite. Our original plan was to camp at Yosemite, but there was no availability so we ended up driving through the park and hiking a bit around sunset. The park had a very different feel than Yellowstone - it was pretty but much harder to navigate, and definitely more conducive to longer stays and more adventurous activities since most of the sights were only reachable by hikes. That night we drove around for hours calling every single hotel within 50 miles and Courtney was yelled at numerous times for accidentally calling private numbers (that our GPS told us were hotels) past 11 pm. She was also called a vagabond by an angry foreign man. We finally ended up in a Motel 6 in Modesto, CA, an hour and a half outside of San Francisco, and set our alarms for an early wake-up call to San Fran.